Several middle income countries are considering reforms of severance pay regulations to both increase flexibility for firms and better protect workers. Policy discussions then often revolve around whether to adopt an unemployment insurance (UI) scheme or unemployment individual savings accounts...

This paper presents a framework for designing and implementing social protection and labor (SP&L) systems in middle and low income countries. Although the term 'system' is used to describe a country's set of social protection programs, these tend to operate independently with little or no...

Throughout the developing world there is a growing demand for advice on the design of policies to facilitate access of the most vulnerable individuals to jobs, while reducing their dependency from public income support schemes. Even though these policies are common to both the activation and...

The paper contains a framework for linking social protection with growth and productivity, an updated review of the literature, new original work filling in gaps in the available evidence, and a discussion of operational implications. The paper demonstrates that there was a shift in the...

Results chains are useful tools to clarify safety nets programs' objectives, verify the program internal logic, and guide the selection of indicators. Although the recent trend has been to focus mostly on outcome indicators, indicators are needed at all levels of the results chain to better...

Cash transfers have proliferated in the past decade as key policy instruments to tackle vulnerability and inequality. Payment mechanisms (PMs), the backbone of cash transfers, are the channels through which cash travels from the funding source to the hands of beneficiaries. In theory, the...

This paper reviews the main challenges facing countries in attempting to improve labor market outcomes among youth, focusing on the issues that became starkly visible during the recent financial crisis. In order to better identify and set up human development interventions, the paper proposes an...

Despite robust annual growth of 5.7 percent in the recent past, poverty in Zambia remains stubbornly high. The poverty headcount rate is 60 percent (as of 2010), and 39 percent of the population live in extreme poverty, with insufficient consumption to meet their daily minimum food requirements....

This report shows that while more inclusive growth is the ultimate solution to poverty in Lesotho, the country can and should use selective social transfers to reduce poverty more rapidly among the extreme poor. But because the majority of the transfers are received by people who are not among...

The report lays out options to use social safety nets to meet the goal set by the Government of Botswana to eradicate extreme poverty by 2016 and in a budget neutral way. Introducing a Family Support Grant is argued to be a more efficient way to address absolute poverty by offering a family...